Tag: atomic bombs
An Oppenheimer Expert Watches ‘Oppenheimer’
This article containers spoilers for the film Oppenheimer.
Few authors have written as insightfully about the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer as Richard Rhodes, whose 1986 book, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, is widely regarded as the definitive account of the Manhattan Project. Rhodes’s comprehensive history, which won a Pulitzer Prize, is both a massive work of scholarship—the main text alone runs nearly 800 pages—and a literary feat that he conceived as “the tragic epic of the twentieth
Staging Nuclear Dread in “Oppenheimer” and “Doctor Atomic”
The late Daniel Ellsberg, in his book “The Doomsday Machine,” drew attention to a curious conversation that took place between Albert Speer and Adolf Hitler in the summer of 1942, on the subject of atomic apocalypse. Speer had asked Werner Heisenberg, the physicist in charge of the faltering German nuclear program, whether an atomic explosion could lead to an uncontrolled chain reaction. Heisenberg did not rule it out. Speer wrote in his memoir “Inside the Third Reich”: